If you are a fan of Goodbye Cruel World (GBCW) diaries you can’t do much better than reading RedState founder Thomas Crown’s rambling masterpiece where he tells the GOP presidential contenders to ‘go Cheney themselves’ and also insults many of our friends.
I have withheld any statement of support for any GOP Presidential candidate because it seemed like bad idea, as a Director of the site, to make such an endorsement, and — God, how I’ve waited to say this — because the whole damned lot can go to Hell. What an incompetent mass of horse rear-flesh bound up in what, on paper, is one of the most talented groups the GOP has ever had. I could go on, but the full thing is in my concurrently posted piece, And the horses you all rode in on, one at a time, then rotate.
I really love Crown’s take on Mitt Romney:
And yet, we’re probably stuck with you, because of the incredible incompetence of your opponents. On the Wonder Years, an otherwise awful and highly forgettable show, the narrator once noted that his parents faced a conundrum when deciding how to decorate the kitchen. Dad would insist on some tile he liked. Mom would insist on some tile she liked. They’d compromise on some tile no one in our species liked.
You are that tile, Mitt. You are the “Eh,” Candidate. Congratulations.
This take is echoed strongly in Harold Meyerson’s piece today:
Which leaves the GOP with Mitt Romney, whose prime virtue is that he’s minimally acceptable to all wings of the party. Indeed, the reason that venerable conservative standard-bearer the National Review gave for endorsing Romney is that he is the candidate most likely “to keep the [conservative] coalition together.” But Romney’s strength is also his weakness: He doesn’t offend Republicans for the positions he takes; he offends Republicans for all the back-pedaling and 180s he’s had to perform in order to espouse the positions that don’t offend them. Besides, standing at the midpoint of the GOP may be a dubious general-election asset to an electorate that increasingly rejects the Republican worldview.
Just another way of saying that Mitt Romney is hideous floor-tile.
A lot of people are discussing the imminent crack-up of the Reagan Coalition. I think it is coming. Nothing is guaranteed, but we could be seeing a lot more GBCW diaries from former Republicans.